


home fetched out in stars

by backlit (cuimhl)



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-23
Updated: 2017-12-23
Packaged: 2019-02-18 23:35:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13110867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuimhl/pseuds/backlit
Summary: Tooru has a notebook of times and places. It is papered with sticky notes about things to remember, futures to look out for, scouting opportunities and volleyball opponents and—at the very back, in small, neat print, Kenma’s birthday. Everything in it is riddled with the disease of regret, the fastidious distillation of fear into small pointers and trail markers that try to distract attention away from the destination to which they will always lead.every choice is difficult, but kenma is the easiest of them all.





	home fetched out in stars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rainingooblah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainingooblah/gifts).



> merry christmas, Robyn! i tried to combine two of your prompts, though i’m not sure the end result took the same direction you might’ve envisioned initially ,,, still, i had a lot of fun writing this, and i hope you like it! best wishes for a happy festive season ღゝ◡╹)ノ♡

 

 _( if you could go anywhere in the world, to any moment in time, where would you go? )_  


 

☆★☆  


 

_August 7, 2012_

“You wrote ‘don’t forget’ on your arm,” Oikawa remarks, when he picks Kenma up from school.

“Yeah, hey, Uncle,” Kenma hums absently, digging his console out of his pocket as he shrugs his backpack more comfortably over his shoulder. “Kuro’s music homework. I told him to remember it himself, but he wouldn’t stop pestering.”

Oikawa is silent for a long time, and only makes a sound of acknowledgement in a very distracted way. Curious, Kenma pauses his game and looks up at his pseudo-uncle, imposter of a man who insists he’s related by blood, but Kenma has overhead that he’s just an old friend of his parents. The usual amused curve to his lips is stuttering into a half-frown, one side of his mouth quirked up in something that almost resembles bemusement. In the September sunlight, sulphurous in the full-bellied amber of late afternoon, he looks younger than his twenty-something years. Older too, in a way, as Kenma regards the melancholic furrow of his brow.

When he catches Kenma looking, the smile spreads easily across his face, but it’s half-hearted and sad. Still, he catches himself quickly and Kenma supposes it isn’t that obvious—Oikawa has called him ‘annoyingly perceptive’ more than once. While Kenma’s parents chide him lightly for his choice of words, Kenma knows: there’s always a mellow softness to Oikawa’s eyes when he says it, as though he’s saying it for someone else who understands the fond weight of the phrase.

“So, what was your favourite part of the day, Kenma-chan?”

“Lunch,” Kenma replies shortly. He notes the subtle shift in atmosphere and resumes his game, the latest edition of a fairly standard battle RPG but a decent way to pass the time.

“Why?” Oikawa persists in asking. His hands are in his pockets now; Kenma was beginning to wonder when he’d feel the cold.

Shrugging, he dodges an attack ingame that blossoms outwards, bright and noisy with static. “I watched Kuro play for a bit. He’s better at close combat mechanics than me.”

“How do you know that?”

When Kenma lifts his head to flash Oikawa a faintly withering glare, Oikawa only returns with his sunniest grin. Gently, he nudges Kenma towards the school gate to, presumably, his parked car. An understated, sleek thing that Kenma hadn’t really associated with his flamboyant uncle, but figures makes sense too in the reticent sheen of its matte finish.

For a moment, Kenma doesn’t answer. He’s preoccupied by his character, knocked flying from one end of the screen to the other, health bar retreating to a dismal pinch of red as he scrambles back to his feet. “Just,” he says with an annoyed huff, “Because I _know_. Kuro’s more confident about acting on a momentary hunch. He reads a move, and responds to it.”

 _My hunches are more solid and inflexible,_ Kenma doesn’t add. Kuroo confesses to malleable judgement open to change and refinement, despite his serious exterior. In comparison, Kenma is much more focused on the architecture of a person’s demeanour that he constructs, painstakingly attentive to each brick and archway, so as to map out their personality and leave nothing exclusively to chance. There’s an ambush in the incertitude of unknowns. Kenma deals only with that which he can physically grasp, to save himself the uneven footing of venturing into an uncharted land.

He and Oikawa are similar in this way, he thinks, but never says aloud. after all, it’s not really any of his business. Oikawa maintains the most ridiculously decorative illusions, but if he were a house of a soul, it’s a fairly simple house. Warmer than most might expect. Also more prone to ejecting unwelcome trespassers without warning, or winding them deeper into the frigid depths of a misleading labyrinth.

Houses are built to hold something in; Kenma muses that both he and Oikawa have, along the way somehow, wound up building theirs to keep something out.

They’re at the gate when Oikawa speaks again. It’s a low murmur that Kenma thinks he wasn’t supposed to hear. “Your handwriting hasn’t changed, huh.” There’s a strange look on Oikawa’s face, everything slipping and pulled downwards by the regretful twist of his smile.

Kenma doesn’t remember exactly when Oikawa came into his life, but he’s sure it was after his eleventh birthday—so, barely a year ago. That leaves no real precedent in handwriting for Oikawa to compare this with, considering that Kenma’s handwriting had about stabilised in its fluctuations between chicken scratch and contrived cursive after fourth grade.

He doesn’t point this out. Oikawa is still staring at his arm, and Kenma almost wants to pull his sleeve down, if only so that the impenetrable Oikawa will stop looking so vulnerable and obviously lonely. It doesn’t seem like the kind of sadness that can be fixed easily; if it’s anything like Kenma and Kuroo, then this constellation of shards and fractures falling apart from Oikawa’s brow might only be salvageable by someone who knows him best. Maybe even Oikawa himself, but he seems to willingly disregard the warning signs of his own body even when they’re pulsing in angry red.

Or maybe he needs to turn his house into a home, and share it with someone else. Kenma wouldn’t know; it’s Kuroo forcing his way across the threshold of his own, but to open his heart in however roundabout a way is oddly uplifting.

That’s why he isn’t surprised, a week later, when Oikawa doesn’t come for his usual weekly visit. Or the week after that. Or ever again. Kenma’s parents are worried, but privately, he thinks it’s fine. People have strange ways of going out and finding themselves, after all.

  


☆★☆

  


_September 23, 2017_

Summer in Tokyo is unforgivingly hot, and even the sound of cicadas and birdsong feels oppressive in the humid heat. Inside the gym, there is the familiar squeak of ball shoes on parquet floor, punches of voices melting into the ambience of practice-volleyball-summer; outside, Kenma’s shirt is stuck to his back and his hair is damp, fingers sticky with ice-cream, and he is trying unsuccessfully to lean away from a petulant Oikawa Tooru.

“A kiss, a kiss,” Tooru is saying, not even bothering to keep his voice down. They’ve been dating for three months, have known each other for longer, but the insistence in Tooru’s voice makes it seem like they’re still lovestruck teenagers drunk on the collision of confessions unable to be apart for even a moment. Of course, who is Kenma kidding? It’s only been three months. The honeymoon phase is far from over.

“It’s too hot,” Kenma pushes him away, deliberately enough to feel a spark of gratification when Tooru shrieks at the smear of ice-cream that Kenma leaves on his cheek. “Can’t we just cool down and go back inside?”

Tooru pouts. “I’m only in Tokyo for two more days,” he replies indignantly, “and you’ve only kissed me _once_ in the five days I’ve already spent here. Aren’t I allowed to miss my boyfriend?”

“Not in this heat,” Kenma mumbles, but there’s still an awkward blush climbing up his neck. Tooru is always so _forward_ , so demonstrative, and it’s not that Kenma doesn’t want to reciprocate—they just have different languages of love, in a way, despite being so effortlessly in tandem otherwise.

Tooru turns away and rifles through his backpack, not replying. Kenma wonders briefly if he’s sulking, if he’ll ignore him for the rest of the day, but then he makes a sound of triumph and flourishes a pack of pocky in Kenma’s face.

“Uh,” Kenma feels trepidation twist in his belly, nerves swarming him in a nebulous, dizzying wave that makes blood rush in his ears. “What—”

“If Kenma-kun is shy,” Tooru interrupts, “we can do this instead.”

There’s a devious glint in his eye, intent blade-sharp as he tears open the packaging to rest a piece of pocky between his teeth. Like he’s daring Kenma to disagree, to beat him to the kiss, or to risk—something. Kenma is really at a loss as to _what_ , exactly.

Well, two can play at that game, right?

Obediently, he leans towards Tooru and bites the other end of the stick, a bubble of giddy warmth expanding inside him when something light and childishly delighted flits across Tooru’s gaze, softening his features endearingly. It’s almost like a kiss, already—the sounds of Tokyo slowly subside, from the thrum of traffic to the sporadically-noisy waltz of volleyball, to the rustle of leaves and the papery clap of birds unsettled from their perch, taking off in a blur of wings into the unclouded sky. Kenma’s vision narrows down to Tooru’s ochre gaze, penetrating even from a distance but infinitely moreso when they’re this close. But he’s never been afraid of it, where perhaps other people might have been intimidated; after all, he’s had the same said of his own stare. In fact, he’s always felt there was something timid about Tooru even though he’s always in motion, always on the offensive, always teasing and exploiting and vibrant with mercurial emotion.

Up close, it has a strangely calming effect. Forgetting to remain wary and disregarding his fleeting urge to prank Tooru’s unsuspecting vulnerability, Kenma welcomes the consuming embrace of Tooru’s searching eyes, an almost imperceptible shadow clearing from his gaze after Kenma returns it squarely. And it might make him feel fragile and unsure to let Tooru page gently through the emotions he can’t quite obscure, not knowing what he will find in his face, but Tooru’s always had difficulty obscuring his emotions for long. So, this is their brand of honest exchange: doors thrown wide open if only people knew how to look, ornaments and distracting façades irrelevant in the safe passage between two very unassuming, if disarmingly profound, houses warm under the sunshine.

Kenma wouldn’t mind kissing him with his eyes open more often, it’s surprisingly nice.

They’re about a hair’s breadth from a kiss. Kenma can feel Tooru’s breath tiptoeing across his cheek, can smell the comforting laundry fragrance of his clothes and even the faintly spicy tang of his favourite deodorant. Yet above all of that, Tooru always smells a bit like cinnamon, and a bit like lavender, and maybe a bit like—

“This is so romantic, isn’t it, Kenma-kun? This is the part where you swoon and wait, with bated breath, to be kissed. Or, if you like, we’ll do it the other way around. How about it?”

Unamused, Kenma’s brows knit together. The cloying sweetness of Tooru’s lilting voice is grating to the ear, and yes, the mischievous half-smile in his gaze has emerged now. He looks entirely too pleased with himself. Likely expecting Kenma to kiss the smirk off his face in his annoyance, Tooru makes a show of licking the pocky crumbs from his lips and puckering them, squeezing his eyes shut.

Mercilessly, Kenma reaches between them and pinches Tooru’s nose in an iron grip, feeling vindictive satisfaction as Tooru yelps and squeals with surprise, then mortification. He babbles something nonsensical about ruining the perfect slope of his beautiful nose and sullying his skin with sugar and oil that will make him break out tomorrow, _just you wait, it’ll happen_ —

“I can't breathe,” Tooru whines in a nasally voice, and Kenma lets him go.

“I’m going back to practice,” Kenma announces. “Unlike someone, my team actually has Nationals to aim for after break.”

“How cruel,” Tooru pouts again, more magnificently exaggerated than before, but he seems oddly happier. “I’ve been working throughout these three years of high school just to defeat Ushiwaka-chan, okay? Everything has been _leading up_ to my eventual success, you’ll see.”

As they walk back to the gym, Kenma ponders the kiss. He isn’t sure why Tooru needed the reassurance of Kenma’s cooperation, before, because clearly that’s all this amounted to. It was never really about the kiss, the pocky, or even irritating Kenma enough to pinch him—Kenma has a sneaking suspicion that Tooru was only waiting for the open vulnerability of Kenma’s returning gaze when they had almost kissed. And then, of course, the idiot felt too exposed so he had to ruin the moment—how typical.

But it’s a _little_ bit sweet. Kenma likes to be sure about Tooru’s affection, too, but that’s a secret he’ll take to his grave.

  


☆★☆  


 

_November 3, 2017_

Sometimes Tooru disappears, for days or weeks or even months at a time.

Kenma is used to it; occupying himself in the absence of late-night phone calls or comedically indecipherable Line messages, he pulls out his grade school diary in a rare mood of nostalgic curiousity. It’s a week before the Tokyo representative matches, and he has an early practice the next morning, but at a quarter to midnight he rifles through the pages absently and finds a scribbled drawing of a time capsule.

 _You know when to open it_ , his twelve-year-old self has written, in the handwriting he still uses to this day. ' _When he comes back,' is what Uncle Oikawa said. I think you’re supposed to know what that means?_

Kenma does not, in fact, know what that means, but it’s obvious enough whom _he_ refers to. Bewildered by his own fascination with the mysterious subject, Kenma sneaks out into his backyard after his parents have turned off the bedroom light and, he assumes, fallen asleep. It’s growing cold now, the soil damp with gathering frost, a night breeze biting into his bare arms. Outside, the pearlescent moon silvers everything in a lambent, dreamlike glow.

Beside the fence, in the corner shrouded in complete darkness, there’s no telltale lump to reveal the location of Kenma’s buried treasure. At least the directions in his journal are straightforward—beside a small clump of daisies in the most overgrown patch of grass, where Kenma hates to mow due to spiders clinging to the fence in a tangle of webs, he crouches down with a shovel and slowly, carefully, unearths a dented tin box.

Prying it open with nails caked in dirt, Kenma winces at the clang of metal and sets the lid gently down on the ground, before inspecting the contents of his time capsule. Inside, there’s only a piece of paper, folded in half with the uneven imprint of writing on the other side.

With some hesitation, Kenma slips the letter into his pocket, and lowers the box back into its burrow. After covering it again in dirt and patting down the mound, Kenma replaces his shovel and tiptoes inside the house. In his room, he unfolds the letter. A nervous, anxious sensation presses down on his gut and leaves him feeling hollow from the arch of his ribs to the pit of his stomach.

It’s not a long letter. He takes a deep breath, and begins to read.

 _Dear Kenma,_ it says, in neat, unadorned handwriting. _Anywhere, to any moment in time, with you._

_That’s how I’d answer. If I could go anywhere to any point in time, I would always go to find you._

  


☆★☆

  


_May 10, 2020_

“So this is the place, hm?” Tooru shoulders the door open with a wide smile. He sets his box down inside the doorway and holds the door for Kenma, who is struggling inside with two of his own.

“The landlord didn’t lie,” Tooru whistles appreciatively as he ducks out to carry in another box, and Kenma makes himself comfortable on the floor. “It’s pretty small, indeed.”

“I guess,” Kenma tilts his head to appraise the ceiling, mottled in one corner with something akin to mould but otherwise unblemished. Then he stretches his legs out and sticks a hand in his pocket for his console, mumbling, “But it’s big enough for us, isn’t it?”

“Hold it!” swooping down, Tooru pinches the console from Kenma’s fingers and dangles it out of reach, his smile soft and fond. “You don’t get to play games until we’ve finished moving in, Pudding-chan.”

Kenma pouts lightly, but he recognises a reasonable request when he sees one. Reluctantly, he stands up again and shuffles to the door, heaving another box into his arms and passing it into Tooru’s waiting hands, before repeating the process. They place the boxes into the rooms to which the contents mostly belong, but that’s largely an inaccurate estimate—Tooru, despite his demands for meticulous organisation, can never last against the innocent charm of a lazy Kenma. Or perhaps it’s deliberate. In any case, they’d spent too long cuddling on the couch and roaring, one-sidedly on Tooru’s part, at video games, to pack the boxes very efficiently.

 _Not_ that it’s because Tooru likes the way his belongings look when they’re all tossed together with Kenma’s. It’s _not_ because of that at all.

They’ve huffed their way through the exhausting chore of unloading one box when Kenma decides he’s had enough. This, he expresses by crumpling the fabric of Tooru’s shirt in his fingers, and holding on as his boyfriend putters uselessly around the empty room trying to arrange their things. Eventually, he becomes too much of a dead-weight, and Tooru shuts away his laments at their unproductivity before succumbing, pulling out two thick blankets from a half-opened box in the bedroom so that they can sit more comfortably on the floor.

“You are really awful, you know,” Tooru admonishes him in mock disapproval. Kenma has crawled into his lap to play his new game, and he only hums in reply.

“Really, really awful,” Tooru repeats, emphatically enunciating his words. This time, Kenma pauses his game and turns his head a little to the side so that he can look up at Tooru, and there’s a happy little indent at the corner of his lips that Tooru leans in to kiss.

“I know,” he says, full of devilish delight. “Can you complete this level for me?”

Their relationship is often considered a mystifying enigma to many, joining two people from seemingly disparate worlds that cannot even qualify to be opposites. The basis of attraction is difficult to imagine, at first glance. But really, Tooru and Kenma _work_ on such a profoundly emotional level that he thinks it’s really quite simple.

This might seem like a bit of a non-sequitur, but Tooru doesn’t think about sex that often. He surprises himself by this sometimes, because back in high school, he’d assumed his future love life would be august and aflame with intimacy, because—well, conquest seemed kind of fun. But at least part of that was the considering way that his classmates would look at him in his first year, when he unwittingly enamoured much of the school’s female population with his soft hair and carefully-crafted smile.

He has never been good at handling other people’s expectations, crumbling under the weight of all the superlatives and assumptions that are flung at him, without ill intent, granted, but crippling all the same. But most of all, Oikawa Tooru hated to seem _weak_ , so he hated to admit that he was struggling. That he cared about what other people thought at all, for one, and then that he wasn’t able to be what everyone expected of him, later on. Hajime always saw through him like glass, like his defenses were paper-thin and always on the verge of breaking if only people knew the right angle from which to prise apart his armor, but Tooru knows that Hajime is special.

So it had been weird, to say the least, when he brushed past a Tokyo setter, back when he still attended the Nationals games with some vestige of hope for triumph over Shiratorizawa, and felt instantly exposed for a fraud.

This is what he tells Kenma when he gets nervous, when his fingers are cold and his palms clammy, when his gaze skitters like he can’t bear to be looked at. It’s also what he finds his mind returning to, when his mouth is loose and Kenma is warm by his side, his skin soft as velvet as Tooru rubs circles over Kenma’s navel.

 

 

_With Kenma-chan, it sounds so cheesy, but I can be my most comfortable self and still feel okay._

_Kenma frowns. Did someone tell you it wasn’t okay to be yourself?_

_Tooru is charmed by his protective anger, however contained it might be, simmering from the junction of Kenma’s brows to his exposed collarbone, to the clench of his knuckles. His Kenma is so cute._

_No, he thinks. No, he says aloud. It’s just easier with you._

 

 

Like sexually active adults, they’re still intimate fairly frequently—but there’s no sense of obligation that weighs them down, like Tooru might have assumed would be the case in a romantic relationship. Kenma seems at first glance to be very orderly and somewhat of a prude (though if he had turned out to be asexual, Tooru wouldn’t have even minded in the least) but sometimes he can be very selfishly impulsive. But always so, so kind. They bounce off of each other’s moods and needs, and this is one of those nights; Tooru resigns himself to the dismal prospect of waking up to a house full of boxes and responsibilities, but he can’t muster up the energy to be angry about it when Kenma is so beautiful in the amber glow of their bedside lamp—the only one they’ve unpacked—as they drift off to sleep.

Hopelessly fond, Tooru traces the shadow of Kenma’s lashes and the way his dark roots are showing again, even after Tooru finally obtained permission to re-dye his hair blonde. Of course, he’d wanted to change the colour—he had been considering pink, or blue, or green. Although Kenma hadn’t seemed averse to the idea, his mother had been slightly alarmed by the suggestion. After all, dying his hair gold in the first place had been so that he ‘wouldn’t stand out’, whatever that meant—Tooru swallows a laugh, and reaches out to brush the loose hair from Kenma’s forehead.

But Kenma isn’t asleep like he had thought; as Tooru’s fingers hover over his brow, Kenma blinks his eyes open and the softness in the way he looks at Tooru makes everything in his chest tighten tenfold.

“Sorry for not letting us finish moving in tonight,” Kenma says.

“Not a problem,” Tooru leans in to press a kiss to Kenma’s hair. “Besides, you didn’t look sorry when you were—”

“You’re insufferable,” Kenma bares his teeth, but then he smiles one of his rare, sun-sweet smiles that make his face light up so delightfully. Worming his way closer in the bed, Tooru feels his small hands curling around his waist and it’s a little ticklish, but terrifyingly precious because how did he get so _lucky_?

“We have to finish the college paperwork tomorrow,” Kenma mumbles suddenly, and Tooru’s heart plummets.

“Which one?”

“The—other one,” Kenma says vaguely, but his shoulders are tense. Tooru knows which he’s talking about: the paperwork that excuses him from sudden disappearances from college, for whatever made-up excuse that his mother had helped him devise this time. Tooru never reads through them properly, because the guilt can become suffocating. He doesn’t always _mean_ to run away, and yet he’s left so many people wounded in his wake.

He likes to think he’s getting better. During high school, there was a time when he would vanish for a week every two months, sometimes longer. He doesn’t want to hurt kenma like that again—

—is what he thinks, but a month, two months, a year, two years later—

—he sits up in their shared bed, the neon fireflies of a cityscape rippling across faintly-disturbed water imploding behind his eyelids, and all he can think about is the way Kenma looked under the streetlights, the way his voice seemed so loud and so quiet as last night’s storm tumbled through the night and blew away in the drowsy reflection of dawn, thin as the belly of a blown-glass jar congealing at the base as it cools—

and he fumbles, fingers, shaking, when he reaches under his shirt for the comforting chain of his favourite necklace, but the rings bite into the pad of his thumb when he presses too hard.

Tooru runs away again.

There’s a finality to it, this time. Kenma wakes up alone, feels for the warm imprint of Tooru’s body beside him and only closes his fingers around cold linen. If all the promises that Tooru had made about _staying, I want to stay with you forever, Kenma_ —if all of them weren’t enough to keep him, what possibly could? Would Tooru ever stay?

Kenma is sick of being left behind all the time, _this_ time. He had stupidly thought that perhaps _this time_ , Tooru would stay. People have always called him reserved, calm, if not cold and indifferent; Kenma thinks mirthlessly, as he doubles over the blanket that Tooru had thrown over them in the night, clutching the fabric to his chest and burying his head in the soft expanse, that they wouldn’t recognise him now. Love does funny things to people, and leaves them all broken and afraid when things don’t work out.

Kozume Kenma doesn’t take _chances_ . He doesn’t take _leaps of faith_ . But that was exactly what Tooru had asked of him in his second year of high school, asking him to _try, with me, just once_ , and Kenma had believed him. It had seemed like the right decision at the time and Kenma acknowledges, in retrospect, that he can’t find it in himself to sincerely regret the years he has spent with Tooru. Some people have it much worse, anyway.

But it still hurts so, so much.

Then again, Kenma is accustomed to being forgotten, abandoned—and it’s not quite the same as what Tooru is doing, but it’s close enough that he can pretend—so, he decides to move on.

  


☆★☆

  


_July 25, 2022_

The world has a lot of opinions about the things that are worth doing in life, from school to family, falling in love, travelling, following passions that blossom into a career. Scrawled in the fineprint is the tacit implication that all things worth doing are, in some way, compensated for their great reward with great loss. Kenma has never suffered heartbreak before, but mired in the depths of his loneliness, he supposes no prior experience would have made this any easier.

In the summer, everything feels slower. Shirts are damp, hair sticky, fingers blunder and Kenma’s mind vaporises under the sun, searingly heavy as the humid heat rests on his shoulders. Summer is for training camps and Kuroo’s ghost stories, Shouyou’s ice-cream, beach trips spent in the shade playing games before being hauled off; summer is for his exasperatingly endearing friends, and Tooru’s stupid summer smile. Tooru loves the summer—loved? Tooru loved the summer. He walked around shirtless in their shared apartment and clambered all over Kenma, long-limbed and sultry, walked barefoot over the bathroom tiles to cool himself down, bought tubs of ice-cream that melted, forgotten, on their benchtop when he pressed Kenma into the sofa and kissed him breathless, weak-kneed, lovedrunk.

Should he still call him _Tooru_ ? It shouldn’t matter. Kenma doesn’t have any experience with break-ups, but he recognises that a part of getting over a relationship is reliant on acceptance. He does not dispute the fact that they were once in love, and might still be, so _Tooru_ reflects that. But he’s moving on anyway.

Tooru calls him to a café in the summer. It’s the fourth year of Kenma’s degree, and he’s been offered an internship over two weeks of winter break. He enjoys what he’s doing, and although he doesn’t quite love it with the kind of consuming passion that Shouyou texts him with when he talks about volleyball and his part-time teaching degree, it’s not as though he ever expected to. Fascination with computer science and game design is enough to keep his career; Kenma doesn’t ask for much.

Tooru is different—always asks for too little or too much, insists on getting his way, and locks all his fears and insecurities away in a myriad of dusty cupboards. What he’s asking for this time is closure, though. It might be the last thing he ever asks of Kenma, so Kenma agrees to go.

The first thing he notices, gaze falling by habit on a familiar figure sitting by the window, is that Tooru looks better than his college days from before he vanished. Guilt and unfounded anger pinch inside him, and Kenma forcibly reminds himself to relax. Selfishly, he takes a moment just to look: silky-haired and well-dressed, Tooru could slip surreptitiously onto a fashion magazine cover and fit right in. There’s faint eye makeup that darkens the slope under his brow, his fingers aren’t covered in bandages from his cooking failures, and he looks relaxed.

 _He’s not yours anymore,_ Kenma thinks, stomach turning over. _Not that he was anyone’s to begin with, but he’s definitely not yours anymore._

Kenma tightens and releases a fist, gathers up his courage and walks over. “Hey,” he says quietly, sitting down on the other end of the table. Tooru startles, and the first emotion that flashes through his unguarded face is a twinge of hurt, and vestigial affection so clear to see that Kenma has to wonder, has Tooru changed in the time they were together, too? The old Tooru was so much more careful about his appearance, his mysterious unreadability. It might simply be due to the time they’ve spent together, but Kenma can’t help feeling that Tooru has become more expressive and easier to understand over the years.

“Hey,” Tooru echoes, a shy smile pressing up the curl of his lips. “Thanks for coming.”

“Of course,” Kenma responds, awkward. What else can he say? Everything he has learned and gained from this relationship surfaces: some are muscle memory, such as opening his stance the way Tooru had guided him once, to encourage easy communication. Others ache like scars, lessons bone-deep that stutter to the lip of manifestation but hesitate; it’s like _Tooru_ is a disease, a fragrance of spring that sinks into the blankets and has to be washed out, slowly, ringlet by ringlet of lingering scent, and in the process of doing so, Kenma becomes a stranger to his own body.

Tooru gave him advice on getting better at small talk, being lamentably necessary on rare occasions, as well as on volleyball, or responding more proactively to the ambience of a social situation that Kenma could read so well but felt less prepared to impact himself. In this moment of anxious tension, Kenma deduces that Tooru is nervous, ashamed, and afraid. But would it be overstepping an unspoken boundary if he reached out to take his hand before it started shaking?

When he clasps his fingers around Tooru’s hand, he hates how well they fit together. Tooru flicks his gaze up to Kenma’s face in surprise, searching, before smiling ruefully in a self-deprecating amusement at what he finds. “You still know me best,” he whispers, and Kenma doesn’t think he was supposed to hear it.

“So,” he clears his throat, “what did you want to talk about?”

Tooru straightens, boards up all of his vulnerabilities as his polite, impassive mask slips on perhaps without him even realising. “You told me we should break up,” he says without preamble.

Kenma doesn’t wince. “I did,” he agrees. After Tooru’s disappearance, Kenma had decided that waiting would be unhealthy, and had given Iwaizumi a letter to relay to Tooru whenever—if, ever—he returned. It feels more like a business transaction, now. A bandaid he must tear off as quickly as he can, so he can go home and nurse the unfamiliar ache in his chest.

“Okay,” Tooru says.

“Okay,” Kenma repeats.

They look at each other, knowing. Tooru seems untouchable and unbearably distant. Kenma recognises his expression, can map out the topography of his features caught in tension, but there is so much they cannot say to each other that between them, the unbridgeable divide holds as an undisturbed body of water and Kenma knows: if he broke the surface, it might all spill over. But he doesn’t want to hear Tooru apologise, because although it might be him primarily at fault, Kenma has not been perfect either. He doesn’t want to say goodbye in tears, and knows that Tooru would hate for anyone to see him cry.

It’s easier, for both of them, like this.

“I have one question,” Kenma confesses, finally. “Are you the same Uncle Oikawa that I met in fifth grade?”

Tooru stares back at him, holding his gaze, unfathomable. Then, he smiles sadly. “I don’t know, am I?”

He is being difficult until the very end. Kenma will not be getting any answers—nor does he think he needs them, necessarily. In another world, fifth-grade Kenma never met his fraudulent Uncle Oikawa; in another timeline, Tooru made different choices, and they take different paths. In this one, this is how it has all worked out. Sighing, Kenma twists around to rifle through his bag, and presses something down on the table between them.

“For you,” his smile tightens, and he thinks he might cry tonight. But no one will be there to see it, and that’s okay. “You like this flavour, right? I just thought—well. It’s for you.”

“Oh,” Tooru says, and he looks at it wide-eyed and silent, eyes glassy. When he lifts his head, the light catches in his watery gaze and Kenma feels instantly trapped, blood roaring and head dizzy as he stands up, pushing his chair back. Everything is happening in waterlogged lethargy, as if he is caught in subaqueous static, trying to swim his way out of a current that only drags him deeper.

“I’ll—I’ll see you,” he stammers, face flushing. It’s not clear to him why he feels this desperate need to leave, but he can’t think straight; his body is operating on autopilot. “Take care, okay, Tooru?”

“Thank you,” Tooru replies, looking winded. Kenma doesn’t know if he’s talking about the gift, or his plea to _take care_. It’s like they’re speaking two different conversations, torn apart on two different train tracks that have diverged at a junction whose coordinates are difficult to determine with any accuracy. It’s like Kenma is loosening his grasp onto everything that makes sense, every constant and source of stability. There is a long way to fall. It already feels as though he’s drowning.

Tooru’s knuckles clench white around the box of pocky, and Kenma doesn’t want to remember this: morning light tumbling through the window, illuminating one side of Tooru’s face. Mint chocolate pocky, fresh from the convenience store after breakfast, Tooru’s favourite. The way he had smiled, all fluttering and tentative, and the waft of his cologne, too thick and jarringly different from his soft lavender scent, almost desperate, like he had something to hide. The both of them, distance widening in between.

Kenma turns away, and heads to the café door. Tooru’s voice is shaky, sweet as caramel, “See you, Kenma.”

  


☆★☆

  


_May 2, 2021_

_“See you, Kenma.”_

“You’ve been busy, lately.”

_“I have, I’m sorry. It’s our anniversary in a few weeks, do you want to go out?”_

“I just want to see you. I don’t really mind what we do.”

_“Oh, Pudding-chan. You make my heart melt. Look, are you at home?”_

Kenma hums affirmatively. “Yeah. You’re at the library, right?”

_“Yup. But I’m almost done with my essay, and there’s this place I’ve been wanting to show you. Are you free?”_

“What—tonight?”

_“Yeah.”_

“I—I guess. But isn’t your essay due tomorrow?”

_“I told you, I’m almost done, trust me. Wait for me at home, okay? I’ll be there soon.”_

Tooru storms through the front door in a gust of spring, the exhalation of a warm evening ballooning through the apartment shadowed by the tang of a brewing storm. It’s a quarter to nine and Kenma looks up from his phone, surprised and already gravitating, helpless, to the excitement on Tooru’s face. There’s colour high in his cheeks and his eyes are bright, coat slipping from his shoulder as he barrels singlemindedly towards Kenma.

“I’m sorry,” he laughs breathlessly against Kenma’s ear, pulling him into a hug. Tooru is softer than he was in the past, no longer exercising on a regular basis, but his shoulders are terribly broad, his chest wide and warm, and—secretly, Kenma loves the way his belly gives under the pressure of his palm, even though Tooru moans all the time about gaining weight. There’s nothing quite like Tooru’s hugs.

When he pulls back, Kenma catches the way Tooru carries in the outside world, from the starburst cigarette smoke tangled in his pockets to the coolness of his cheek, hair tousled by the wind, shirt  faintly redolent of the wood varnish scent so pervasive in the college library. But he’s only looking at Kenma, hands slipping from his shoulders to hold Kenma’s, smiling in the gentlest of ways.

“It’s a bit late,” he admits apologetically, “but do you still want to go out?”

Kenma knows that Tooru is careful about asking him to go out; he understands the difficulty of navigating public spaces, the largely irrational fear of drawing attention, and only pushes when he thinks it necessary. In turn, Kenma tries to accommodate Tooru’s love of exploration; tonight, he takes one look at the guileless hope that Tooru can’t quite hide, and the decision is obvious.

“Of course,” he says, kissing Tooru lightly on the nose. “Show me the place.”

It’s a place that Tooru has been thinking of showing Kenma for a long time. Truthfully, he had been planning to save it for their anniversary night as something extra special, but Kenma had sounded so forlorn and lonely that the sadness, which he usually kept out of his voice, had melted through the receiver. Although Tooru knows that objectively, his schoolwork had been very time-consuming especially in his effort to maintain stellar grades, he still has to berate himself for neglecting Kenma so unforgivably over the past few weeks.

A few streets down from their apartment, the road winds up a steep incline. Tooru has to bodily drag Kenma to the summit; however willing Kenma’s cooperation might be, it doesn’t alter the fact that his stamina is seriously wanting. Out of breath and sweating in the warm night, they amble up to an abandoned square of land, still awaiting construction. Clambering over a dilapidated wooden fence and following a barely-discernible gravel path down to a rocky outcrop on the hill, Tooru finally leads Kenma to the edge and—

“Wow,” Kenma breathes.

Below them is a dark, vast, unlit lake, bordered by an overgrown reserve in the valley between their neighbourhood and the firefly glow of the city. In the still water, the moon trembles under the rippling palm of a quiet breeze, and the amber lights of skyscrapers haloed in neon coalesce with flickering starlight.

“Can we go down?”

“I haven’t tried, but I don’t see why not.”

Tooru picks his way down the decline of packed dirt and loose stones, gripping the feeble glow of his phone torch in one hand as though they are lost tourists, and Kenma’s palm in his other. The ground evens out into overgrown grass as they descend safely, and Kenma pulls Tooru to the edge of the water like a man transfixed. From this angle, the lights blur over his face like bruises, but when he turns to Tooru with an eager delight scarcely seen outside the domain of game stores, the patchwork of colours separate into pinpricks of red and gold flowering over the crest of his right cheekbone, and Tooru swallows a breath, struck dumb.

Kenma is and has always been beautiful, with his sharp edges and soft gestures, but he is especially so in this moment. _Oh_ , goes Tooru’s heart. _So this is_ —

“Thanks for taking me here,” Kenma says into the quiet night. His voice is hushed and reverent, consonants clear. Tooru squeezes Kenma’s hand in reply and hopes, for a fleeting moment, that he can hold on forever.  
  


 

There’s a certain mood that Kenma gets into sometimes. His gaze sharpens and his smile turns predatory, his touch deliberate and purposeful, and it absolutely _unravels_ Tooru. This is how Kenma looks when they get home — _home_ is a word that Tooru can’t grow tired of saying — and Tooru is pushed against the kitchen counter, not forcefully or painfully, but in a way that leaves no room for refusal. Not that he _would_ , and he knows Kenma would stop if he asked, but the way his composure shatters is so tangible that his skin starts to feel fever-hot, and it leaves Tooru feeling so scattered he doesn’t know how he could stand to be here or, worse, be anywhere else ever again.

Kenma is always painfully gentle even when he acts like this, teasing with his fluttering touches over Tooru’s shoulder, his nape, a brush of thumb over his hipbone, whimsical as a fish caught between bare hands. When he rises on his toes to kiss Tooru, the brush of his lashes over Tooru’s cheek as he closes his eyes is so tender and delicate that Tooru almost wishes he could be rougher, so it doesn’t feel like he’s always on the precipice of losing something so precious to him.

“Tooru,” Kenma mouths against tooru’s lips, and he shudders helplessly at the shape of his name pressed back into him like it finally fits. _Tooru_ , for a first strike, for breaking through, for holding on until the end. It’s always felt awkward thrown around his shoulders, like the bitter weight of the Seijoh flag when they suffered every defeat, but worse. Like he stole someone else’s name and now has to repent for his crime, by being everything and everyone he was ever supposed to be. But Kenma says it as though no other name would fit him, and it sounds so beautiful between his teeth that Tooru is almost tempted to open his arms and invite him to unearth all the pieces he’s buried away over the years.

Here, Kenma hesitates and pulls back just a little, so he can look at Tooru. There’s a memory that hits him like a punch to the gut—Tooru is winded by the recollection of a summer back in high school, the cool swell of water against his palm and the way insecurity carved away at his insides like a twisting knife, but even then, Kenma had assuaged his swarming fears with the same look of transparent devotion that he wears now.

“Do you want to?”

Tooru huffs out a small laugh, and cups his palm against the back of Kenma’s head to pull him in for another kiss. This one he leads, pushes and tugs Kenma closer so he can still taste him in his mouth when they break for air. Outside, it’s starting to storm. Thunder crawls across the sky with the uneven press of knuckles into bellows of noise, prying apart the seamless sky. Rain kicks at their windowpanes and tinkles lightly against the ceramic of a potted plant out on their balcony. Kissing Kenma feels like the drag of a storm against the cage of his ribs now, a breathless fall into the unlit belly of the ocean as it swallows past Tooru’s ears. Everything feels turgid, slow, bloated; falling for Kenma was like this, too. So gradual and natural that Tooru had forgotten to be cautious about sharing his heart.

Smiling, he knocks his forehead against Kenma’s. “Of course. Do you?”

Kenma relaxes in a way that might have been unnoticeable, but Tooru has grown used to his quirks and habits: the way the muscles in his shoulders knot together in tension and how he bites his lip very slightly when he’s worried about something. He kisses him again.

The rain doesn’t let up all night even as the shadows deepen, and the moon slips in and out of view from their bedroom window. Tooru watches Kenma as he shifts drowsily against his arm; sometimes he is sure that he’s awake, other times he thinks he might be asleep, but Kenma seems aware that Tooru has yet to join him in slumber and so struggles awake every now and again with a cute scowl when he finds Tooru watching him.

“What,” he asks flatly once or twice, voice quiet and blurring over the consonants.

“Nothing,” Tooru whispers back, but he’s not very convincing. There’s a strange feeling in his chest, a sensation of being too full and too empty at the same time, and he’s used to the hollowness but—it’s—never been counterbalanced in such an alien way by this _other_ feeling that he doesn’t know what to think. It’s as though he has finally resurfaced from the tranquil reverie of the depthless sea, reaching the air that has remained a distant yearning even as he lingered underwater, but now that he has finally returned to it—

It doesn’t feel the same anymore.

He’s distracted by Kenma burrowing deeper against the curve of his chest. “Liar,” he murmurs against Tooru’s skin, and he shivers. “You don’t have to talk about it, though.”

For whatever bizarre reason, this makes Tooru’s throat tighten and he swallows around a sudden ache in his chest. A cancerous, inexorable web of insecurity stretched thin over the film of his heart that has always been too frail, too easily broken, even though he swears he’s never fallen in love before. Tooru is beginning to think there should be a sequel to that posturing constant: he’s never fallen in love before _this._ Whatever this is. Whatever this—his chest hurts. He doesn’t want to think.

“Tooru?”

“Yeah,” he manages, eyes burning. His smile feels watery and tentative, and Kenma would doubtlessly call it the most genuine smile that he has ever surrendered, if he could see it in the darkness.

There’s a pause, and then—“Don’t you dare cry, you big idiot.”

Tooru makes an undignified sound that is some nameless hybrid between a choked sob and a pained laugh. He is so, so in love. “You’re annoyingly perceptive, did you know that?”

He flicks Kenma lightly on the forehead, and Kenma glares at him, the reflective amber of his irises catching the moon, holding it captive in the spherical arch of his gaze. Tooru swallows again, feeling cornered and afraid. He hasn’t felt like this since he learned how to hide himself behind the husk of his charisma, since the first time Hajime had stood up for him in elementary school. Without even trying, it seems as though Kenma can take him apart and understand all the pieces, like he’s solving a mathematical problem.

 

 

_Tooru wants to paint a cube, made up of many smaller cubes, red. There are nine visible cube faces on each side of the larger cube. How many faces of the smaller cubes must be painted red?_

 

 

Even the unpainted sides. Even the raw, unadorned, ugly sides that Tooru doesn’t want anyone to see, but which Hajime accept, and which Kenma is cradling in his soft palms with his gentle fingers and examining from every angle, as if they’re all worth knowing about.

“If you could go anywhere in the world,” Kenma asks suddenly, “to any moment in time, where would you go?”

It’s their tradition to hold excessively long conversations in bed when they should be trying to sleep, although the discussions consist largely of Tooru musing aloud about the existence of aliens. Somehow, Kenma has figured out that Tooru is unsettled by something; the familiarity of what he is trying to initiate manages to ground Tooru in the moment, anchor him more firmly in what is safe and well-traversed. He wants to plunge into the warmth of Kenma’s proffered sanctuary, but this is precisely what terrifies him—Tooru is afraid that constancy comes at a price, and he is _more_ afraid of the fact that he is willing to risk that price just to have this.

“Go to sleep,” Tooru whispers, voice inflected with a touch of desperation. Kenma regards him for a long moment, solemn, and Tooru is struck by the consuming terror and simultaneous excitement that he will refuse and force Tooru to explain himself. And Tooru thinks he might, thinks his legs are cramping as he tries to hold up the weight of all the guises and pretenses he’s ever thrown on to meet expectations, and now might be a good time to let it all collapse.

But Kenma doesn’t ask, doesn’t push him. Tooru expected this too. Instead, Kenma presses a slow kiss right over Tooru’s heart, eyes fluttering closed obligingly.

“You’re home,” Kenma murmurs barely audibly, almost like he’s sleep-talking and is holding a deeply important conversation with someone in his dream, because he is frowning with the supposed significance of his words. “Wherever and whenever you go, if there’s a home waiting for you, you’ll be alright. It’s always safe at home, Tooru.” Then he breathes out, and lets himself melt away to slumber.

  


☆★☆

  


_September 26, 2017_

In true Oikawa Tooru style, the boy in question stays back after the Nekoma-Seijoh training camp to make everyone’s life harder. “Only because you wouldn’t kiss me in the week that I’ve spent here _legitimately_ ,” Tooru complains. He is still nursing the bump that he claims Iwaizumi had left on his head for his selfish dramatics, when the team left yesterday on their bus to the train station.

Kenma rolls his eyes, trying in vain to finish the literature homework that he has been neglecting. “I _did_ kiss you,” he defends, “and the other time, you ruined the atmosphere.”

“Ah, so Kenma cares about things like that, now?” Tooru waggles his eyebrows, leaning forward with elbows braced on his thighs. “Romantic details like _atmosphere_ , _mood_ —my, my, have I converted an unbeliever?”

“Get off my bed,” Kenma answers without inflection, and Tooru winks at him as he flounces to Kenma’s desk and sits down on his chair.

“Don’t you have college entry exams to study for?”

“I do!” Tooru spins around on Kenma’s swivel chair with unabashed glee. “But I’m not studying for them right now, am I?”

“No, clearly not,” Kenma grouses, leaning over to snatch a book teetering over the edge of his desk, threatening to fall. “Instead, you’re being five years old and bothering _me_.”

This gives Tooru pause, and he stops briefly in his immature antics. Then he hesitates—the first warning sign that blares full force at Kenma, yelling that something is wrong—and asks, trying to play it off as casual teasing but failing dismally, “Do I always bother you?”

Kenma isn’t entirely sure what to do in this situation. If he exposes the flirtatious question for anxiety, Tooru might clam up. If he dismisses it, Tooru might swallow his self-doubt and let it fester, linger too long unattended in his system, before it erupts unexpectedly when he least needs it to. So Kenma goes for an intersection of the two, setting aside his homework to slide his legs down over his mattress, loosening his limbs to assume a posture of openness. Really, dealing with Oikawa Tooru is like handling a skittish, wild animal. If this was what Kuroo had to put up with trying to befriend Kenma when they were younger, well. Kenma is a little bit apologetic.

“Yes,” he replies, chasing Tooru’s downcast gaze to make it abundantly clear that he doesn’t mean it. Tooru flinches very subtly, but he eases into a more comfortable position on his chair and returns Kenma’s stare, like he does when Kenma is panicking quietly in a crowded venue and only Tooru’s  attentive, silent reassurance can calm him down.

“You’re a volleyball idiot,” Kenma continues, brushing his hair back from his face and tucking it behind his ear. He might let Tooru dye it the next time they meet, like he has been nagging him for the permission to do over text all summer. “You’re obnoxious, you spend too long on your hair even though after an hour it looks the same to me as it did when you fell out of bed.”

Tooru squawks indignantly at this, mouth opening to retaliate, but Kenma forges onward. “But you’re the only one who knows how to talk to me like I’m listened to, even though you’ll always be second place behind Kuro—”

“Kenma-chan—”

“And I like you a lot, so shut up, okay? And talk to me sometimes, when you really want to. Don’t be so dumb when you know that I _know_.”

“Oh,” Tooru mumbles, dropping Kenma’s gaze and slumping towards the ground. There’s an obvious blush blotchy around his neck, and he still looks tired under all the flashy showboating, but—he looks better. Kenma isn’t really fond of pretentious metaphors, but he is reminded of Shouyou’s excited ramblings about Date Tech’s famous ‘iron wall’ and thinks this might look a bit like that: like Tooru is relaxing from an oppressive block and he’s letting Kenma into the gated garden of his heart, one step at a time.

“I’m the _senpai_ here,” he whines at length, sitting upright again and tipping his head back at Kenma’s ceiling. He doesn’t want Kenma to look at him, probably. Because _blushes make me ugly, Pudding-chan, and I’m the ugliest crier!_ But Kenma disagrees, thinks he looks the most beautiful when he’s being heartbreakingly honest.

It’s an unsaid _thank you_ , a silent _I know_. This is why they fit together, even though people have always had double takes when either of them mentioned in passing that they were dating. This is why Kenma isn’t as afraid anymore, at least not as much as he was in the beginning, of the kindling embers that tickle his insides with the spark of something whose identity he suspects he knows but won’t acknowledge until he’s sure he’s ready.

“Anyway!”

In a heartbeat, Tooru is leaping off the chair and striding towards Kenma, uncapping a marker from Kenma’s desk with deft fingers and kicking the chair back behind him. Startled and full of climbing apprehension, Kenma wriggles back on his bed, rumpling the blanket that Tooru had smoothed with annoying and painstaking precision just a few hours earlier.

“What do you want?” he asks warily, stomach lurching lightly when he feels his back hit the wall. “If you’re going to draw on my face, I’ll yell that I’m being assaulted—”

“Kenma-chan,” Tooru wrinkles his brow in feigned hurt at the threat, but he’s biting back a laugh. “I would never! Just hold out your arm, I promise I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Um, no,” Kenma tugs his sleeve down and cradles his arm close to his chest, sticking out a foot to brace against Tooru’s chest as he leans even closer. “You have a train to catch in half an hour; I can’t believe you stayed behind in Tokyo after the training camp was over even though all your teammates have left. You really don’t want to miss that.” He eyes the uncapped marker with undisguised fear.

Tooru tsks, smiling softly. “Naughty Pudding-chan, what could I possibly want to do with a marker that would take more than half an hour?”

“More than ten minutes,” Kenma corrects. “It will take at least twenty to get to the station by car.”

Tooru rolls his eyes, “More than ten minutes. Look, I just want to write something on your arm, okay? A souvenir, because obviously you’re going to miss me terribly when I’m gone.” He punctuates this with a wink, smile tugging up in that infuriatingly pretty smirk that he does without even realising, in stark contrast to the practiced smile that is so obviously false and excessive that brought them together in the first place when Kenma bluntly pointed it out.

So Kenma is weak sometimes, too. “Fine,” he concedes, heart stuttering as the afternoon sunlight captures Tooru’s side profile in the most flattering gold. “Have mercy,” he adds quickly, because he is not so far gone in his besotted daze that he has no sense of self-preservation left, even around the largely harmless Oikawa Tooru.

“Of course.” Tooru pulls Kenma’s sleeve up and presses a quick kiss to his forearm, before looking at Kenma from under his lashes with a coquettish lick of his lips. Then, without warning, he scribbles a few characters down on Kenma’s arm and lets the sleeve fall again, obscuring it before Kenma can read the words.

“It’ll wash off,” Tooru says as he leans back, but he’s worrying at his lip. “But the sentiment won’t, okay?”

“Okay,” Kenma echoes quietly, smiling.

Tooru is reluctant to leave, so Kenma sees him to the train station. As his mother drives, they timidly clasp hands in the backseat and Tooru apologises profusely for the inconvenience when they disembark, but Kenma’s mother is nothing if not charmed. And supportive, too, but Kenma has yet to explicitly confess his relationship to her—though she shares Kuroo’s perspicacity, and he suspects that she already knows.

Kenma’s room already feels too quiet, too empty, without Tooru’s larger-than-life presence filling it out. Tentatively, he shucks his sleeve up and feels his breath catch at Tooru’s parting message:

 

 

_don’t forget_

 

 

in his honest, candid hand that Tooru only uses to write when he’s with people who are dear to him. It’s without all the flourishes and gaudy artifice that Tooru carries around like a pocketful of glitter, but Kenma is beginning to think he doesn’t mind how Tooru writes his kanji. Once, it was a thrill just to know that Tooru cared, but now Kenma is getting better at recognising Tooru— _his_ Tooru—under all the veiling layers, and there’s a warmth in the security of knowing that he would be able to find him anywhere, however terribly hard he tried to conceal himself.

But he’s also hit with a pang of longing, when Tooru doesn’t return his Line messages for three days in a row and Kenma knows, even though he texts Iwaizumi offhandedly to check, that Tooru has vanished again. At least this time, he didn’t leave completely without saying goodbye, but it still stings.

_When will you stay?_

  


☆★☆

  


_August 1, 2022_

Oikawa Tooru can travel through time. It’s a gift—or a curse—that has waltzed through his lineage, skipping some generations, manifesting in others, and never entirely detectable because it is dependent on the needs of the individual in order to work.

The first time he jumped through time was at a difficult junction in his childhood, before he met Hajime. The neighbourhood children were kind enough, but there were a handful who still teased him for his girly looks and dutiful disposition. To Tooru, it didn’t seem like that big of a deal; he knew plenty of girls, after all, who could hold their own and do much, much more than that, starting with his superhuman mother. For a time, he even toyed with the idea of being a girl, and it was comfortable—but he decided that he still felt best in his own skin as a boy.

Nonetheless, some of the bullies wouldn’t let up. When Tooru climbed trees and came back scabbed, covered with mud, a few kids lurking by the corner of his street emerged with jars of beetles and spiders. Tooru has made his peace with the insect world now, but back then he was terrified. When he finally made it home, tears dried on his cheeks and nose crusted with snot, no amount of bathwater could make him feel safe from the tingling feeling of tiny legs crawling all over his arm—which was, thankfully, the lowest to which the children stooped. Scrubbing his skin over and over until it turned red and stung, Tooru braved kindergarten for one more day after that before shutting himself in his room and stoutly refusing to come out.

It was then—wishing he was elsewhere, older, stronger, less alone—that Tooru stuck his hand under his shirt and pulled out the necklace that had been passed down from his grandmother, twisting it over in his pale hands until he blinked once and found himself, indeed, somewhere else.

“Tooru!”

He had scrambled to his window, noting with some disorientation that his room was a little different, if only slightly so, and found a frown-faced boy waving his arms at him outside. Clearly hesitating, Tooru started when the boy rolled his eyes and called his name again, “Hurry up! Auntie sliced watermelons, don’t you want some?”

“Tooru,” his mother had called, then, from the kitchen. “Hajime-kun is calling you, do you want to go over?”

 _Hajime_. Tooru had turned the name around in his mouth, savouring the strange taste of syllables that felt inexplicably familiar. When he had finally summoned the courage to go outside, Hajime’s scrunched-up expression had eased and his smile was unexpectedly wonderful. Even back then, he was the most considerate and thoughtful person Tooru had ever met—if calling his own mother ‘Auntie’ for Tooru’s benefit had not, already, been enough of an indication.

Three nights later, secure with the knowledge that Tooru at age five would have a best friend like Hajime to look forward to, Tooru closed his eyes and wished himself back with the cool weight of his grandmother’s necklace resting in his palm.

Tooru has always been a fast learner.

After initially causing havoc with his disappearance, Tooru had shyly explained the experience to his mother, who had wrapped him up in a suffocating embrace. The relief was evident in her teary smile, and she had called him her _clever, brave, beautiful son. But powers are dangerous so promise me to always come home, okay, Tooru?_

And Tooru promised her, still returns home every time he skips out of linear time, just like he is now, listening to the familiar sounds of his mother watching television in the lounge. Because he’s self-aware enough to realise that for his entire life, he has only ever used time travel to run away. From Kenma, after their first practice match in his second year at Aoba Johsai, because he was overwhelmed by the novelty of being read so thoroughly by someone else. From Hajime, when Tooru was afraid to face a future without his dearest friend in the world. From Kenma again, all throughout his third year, all throughout college, even that night—the glow of starlight and a neon cityscape reflected in the still, dark water still returns to him in eidetic recollection. _Especially_ that night.

Something has settled inside of him. A tension, a longing. Perhaps a band has snapped, or perhaps he has just now, for the first time, allowed himself to breathe, to want this sense of placid equilibrium for the rest of his life.

 _Kenma_ , he curls the name around his tongue, swallows it. The answer as always been there — his desperation for Kenma to remember him, however selfish of a demand it was; the way Kenma had smiled at him in the mouth of the night like he was made of stars; how he had whispered _home_ against Tooru’s skin and left a single word trembling through his body, recalibrating the constellation of his bones into something for which self-acceptance seemed dangerously safe. Because Tooru has looked for veiled threats always, and it’s hard to grow out of a habit, just like it is hard to grow out of loving someone who has made their home in the abandoned attic of Tooru’s heart as though it is not something barren and unloveable.

Tooru has a notebook of times and places. It is papered with sticky notes about things to remember, futures to look out for, scouting opportunities and volleyball opponents and—at the very back, in small, neat print, Kenma’s birthday. Everything in it is riddled with the disease of regret, the fastidious distillation of fear into small pointers and trail markers that try to distract attention away from the destination to which they will always lead.

Tooru has always been afraid: of the world, of unpredictable things, of unpredictable people. He has tried so, so hard to figure out what people think they need and then proceeded to mould himself to the ideal, just so that he will be able to anticipate their reactions, and nothing will take him by surprise. He never wants to be that boy, startled by three leering children to cower beneath their sticky hands and the unwelcome tickle of insects that made his skin crawl until he wished it would fall off. Those children didn’t know any better—Tooru knows them as adults, now, and they’re not so bad. They’re nice, even. They probably don’t even remember the incident, and it’s not as though Tooru can just lump all of his grievances in two decades of self-destructive people pleasing onto their one thoughtless prank. But it’s left a shadow, like many things have.

And Kenma doesn’t dismiss those shadows. He handles them with care without needing to be told, but still believes, wholeheartedly, that Tooru is better than all of them.

All the expectations and personas that Tooru has been carrying around, stumbling under the burden, seem braced to scatter so easily now—because that’s all they are, right? Pillars of ash and sand that he has made out to be more frightening than they should have been, deceiving himself this entire time, wrestling with the preconception that he will never be free of an illusion almost completely self-constructed when he could have been happier so much sooner.

With conviction, Tooru lays down the notebook on his bedside table—perhaps one day he will find it again, and laugh, with Kenma. Then he sits up on his bed, holds onto his necklace for, he thinks, the last time, and shuts his eyes.

  


☆★☆

  


_July 29, 2012_

“Why aren’t you using the front door, Uncle Oikawa?”

Kenma is unimpressed by the figure that Oikawa casts, silhouetted against the swell of the moon, trespassing in his backyard. His parents have retired to bed, but Kenma doesn’t know if they’re asleep or not—though in all likelihood they won’t check his bedroom later.

Heaving a sigh, he clambers out of his window and hops lightly down onto the damp grass, cocking his head inquisitively at the tin box tucked under Oikawa’s arm. Oikawa is smiling, and he hushes him as he leads the way to a secluded corner in the backyard left undisturbed by Kenma’s mother’s futile gardening efforts, or his father’s attempt to fix the slight lean in the battered fence.

“It’s a time capsule,” Oikawa explains conspiratorially. “There’s a letter inside, for you. You have to open it when you think you’re ready, isn’t that fun?”

“Not really,” Kenma frowns. “Are you asking me to dig a hole in my backyard?”

“Well—yes,” Oikawa admits. “But I’ll help you, see?”

“No,” Kenma refuses flatly.

“Come _on_ , Kenma-chan.” Oikawa is undignified when he’s trying to wheedle something out of a twelve-year-old child.

Well, it’s not as though Kenma is particularly fond of that patch of dirt. With some exasperation, he finds a shovel leaning beside his father’s shed and pushes it into Oikawa’s uncomprehending hands. “I’m not doing any digging. If you want to bury it there, then you have to dig it yourself.”

“So uncooperative,” Oikawa complains, but he doesn’t disagree.

He works quietly, and the sound of shoveling dirt is oddly therapeutic in the soft, susurrus whisper of gathering soil falling loosely together. A thought strikes Kenma. “What if it’s a bomb?”

This shocks a laugh out of Oikawa, who pauses in his digging to smile at Kenma. He’s so surprised that he doesn’t even bother trying to lie, and Kenma is satisfied by the answer. A few minutes later, he finishes digging and rests the shovel against the fence, leaning back to admire the fruit of his labour.

Then he turns to Kenma, wiggling his fingers and gesturing towards the box, so Kenma hands it over and Oikawa places it gently in its little alcove. Crouching down to pat the dirt over his box, he murmurs, “Kenma?”

“What?”

Oikawa is quiet as he finishes his work and straightens, stretching out his cramped arms and legs. Still silent, he twists his hands, untwists them, twists them together again. He still has his back facing Kenma. “Can I ask you a strange question?”

“No,” Kenma frowns. “Why?”

“Just—” Oikawa ignores his reply. “If—if you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go? And when would you go there?”

Kenma considers ignoring the question, too, but Oikawa turns towards him and his gaze is imploring, nervous.

“To the game store,” he answers simply. “During school hours, I guess.”

Heaving a deep sigh, Oikawa’s lips twitch in an indulgent half-smile. “Can I ask why?”

“No,” Kenma bites his lip. “Fine. Because I like games, and I don’t like school.”

“But your grades are good.”

Kenma scoffs, “Only because Kuro tutors me before every test.”

“Oh,” Oikawa says, studying the ground confusedly. “But—wouldn’t you want to go anywhere else? Somewhere more fun?”

“But I like games,” Kenma tilts his head slightly. “Isn’t that enough of a reason?”

“Just because you like it?”

“Yeah. Why would I go somewhere I don’t like?”

“But how do you know if it’s the right decision? I—I mean, not with games, but something you like. What if there’s nothing you like?”

“Then I guess there’s something you like more than something else.” Kenma shrugs. This is much more within Kuroo’s domain of expertise. “Something that, if you lost it, you’d be sad about. Something that would benefit you more if it stays around. You know.”

“That’s a long sentence,” Oikawa breathes a sad little laugh. “And if it hurts you?” Oikawa’s voice is barely above a whisper.

Kenma looks up at the night sky, inhaling. “Then drop it. And if that makes you sad, keep it. It’s not that hard.”

“And...if you’ve lost it?”

Kenma squints at Oikawa. “Did you drop your favourite volleyball down a creek, or something? Find it, or get a new one. Stop asking me questions, I want to go to bed.”

For a moment, Oikawa looks thunderstruck by revelation. His face is raw with vulnerability, a whole swathe of sadness and hope in a heartbeat so intimately personal that Kenma has to look away. When he recovers, his smile is shaky. “So impertinent,” he exhales in mock exasperation, reaching out to tousle Kenma’s head, just as he ducks away.

“Thanks, Kenma. I owe you one.”

“Good night, Uncle Oikawa.”

He watches from beside his open window as Oikawa unlatches the back door and closes it behind him, waving to Kenma from outside the fence. On a whim, Kenma calls out as loudly as he dares, “I hope you find it.”

“What’s gotten into you?” Oikawa laughs, his voice carrying in little punches of sound. “The old Kenma wasn’t like this.”

“You say it like you know me,” Kenma scrunches up his nose. “Oh—but what do I do with the box?”

"The time capsule," Oikawa corrects, pedantic as usual. "I told you: open it when you think you're ready." He winks, before adding helpfully, "When he comes back, I mean."

"He?"

"Bye, Kenma-chan!"

Kenma gives up on pursuing a clear answer for Oikawa's little mystery. "Goodnight, Uncle. I'm going to sleep." He climbs back into his room, and shuts the window.

“Alright,” Oikawa replies, but Kenma doesn’t hear him.

  


☆★☆

  


_Another time, another place_

In Tooru’s first year of high school, the entire volleyball team goes to Tokyo to watch the Nationals games for which they, by the slightest margin, had missed out on qualifying. Tooru is still aching with frustration and his muscles feel heavier than even his heart, but he sees the value in what his coach has suggested, so he takes it upon himself to observe all the Nationals teams with a discerning eye without collapsing under the disappointment of failure.

It’s there that, returning from a toilet break, Tooru collides bodily with the significantly smaller frame of a middle school student. He’s nondescript and unremarkable when they step back to apologise to each other, except for his golden eyes that seem unsettlingly penetrating.

Instinctively, Tooru flashes him a smile, but just as they make to continue on in their respective directions, the boy suddenly speaks.

“Why are you hiding the fact that you’re sad?”

“Kenma,” his companion hisses—and Tooru realises that, in the moment, he hadn’t even noticed there was a taller boy beside the stranger; how could he have let himself be so _distracted_ when he’s trained himself to remain aware of everything in his environment—and nudges the smaller boy forwards. He doesn’t resist, and soon they have walked past Tooru, who is still reeling from the unexpected exchange.

“What,” he stammers, without thinking. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” the boy replies, tensing up. “I didn’t—nothing.” Without turning to look at him, he keeps walking.

But it’s _everything_. Tooru can count the number of people who can see through him on the fingers of one hand: Hajime, Makki, Mattsun, and Yahaba. He supposes his coach counts, too. But Hajime has known him all his life, and everyone else can only pinpoint a discordance between the face he shows and the one he hides—never extricate it from his defenses so easily, with so much direct simplicity.

When Tooru skims a volleyball magazine and catches the same pair of golden eyes on the _Nekoma_ team, substitute setter, Tokyo powerhouse school, Tooru shows it to his captain, who then mentions it in passing to their coach. Within a month they’re back in Tokyo, scouting strategies and investigating the team that knocked down Shiratorizawa so decisively the year before, and organising an impromptu practice match with Nekoma while they’re there.

It’s not the first of firsts.

Tooru can’t remember if he has done this more than once, if he is caught in a cycle, if he has made the same decision to return to this moment before, but none of that matters. When he meets the gaze of Nekoma’s soon-to-be setter from across the net, for the first time in this timeline, Tooru breaks into a smile that he doesn’t even make an effort to hide. _This time_ —

Kenma regards the players of Aoba Johsai with a degree of inexplicable apprehension, and he chalks it up to their frightening reputation in Miyagi. Especially their setter: _Oikawa Tooru_.

He recognises him as the boy he ran into half a year ago, in the Tokyo gymnasium with Kuroo. Strange to remember someone he only met for a brief span of seconds, but it had seemed like an important encounter at the time. More than that, he recognises him as the middle school player who was awarded _best setter_ , and as something else, too—a twinge of memory like a polaroid, bordered by sharp lines around the edges but fraying in the center, fading away even as he struggles to hold onto it.

Fact: he has met Oikawa before.

Yet there’s more; vaguely, intuitively, he thinks he knows Oikawa. From another time or another place, older and taller and softer than this.

Not that it makes any difference—they’re here to play a practice match, and Oikawa—or Tooru—is only going to coalesce with all the other shadows of unfamiliar players that Kenma must analyse and break down so that they can figure out how to win. Even though he’s not allowed to play full games yet, Coach Nekomata still insists he attend these games because he has a good eye for volleyball, or so he says.

Between the first and second sets, Kenma slips outside to refill a few water bottles. He does it partly to evade the third years, who order him around anyway, and partly because—well, he’s not sure. It’s just a feeling.

“Kozume Kenma, right?”

Kenma can’t say that he wasn’t expecting this. Some part of him _was_ , still stubbornly enchanted by the mysterious sensation of recognising someone towards whom he is sure that he shouldn’t be feeling so keenly drawn, perhaps even vaguely attracted, though there’s a yearning hooked to his gut that has been growing stronger and more insistent throughout the match. Kuroo has looked over at him in concern more than once; Kenma doesn’t want to worry him like that.

Which means he has to blame this distraction on something, and Oikawa presents the perfect subject.

The irritation is corrosive as Kenma nods silently at Oikawa’s question, and wishes the water would run faster so that he can duck back inside. There’s an ugly, chaotic mess of negative emotion churning in his stomach: Kenma can dissect them into a sense of betrayal that he can’t quite place, even the pinch of desire, but—it’s too complex and bewildering for him to want to investigate any further than that.

“I’m going to say something weird. Is that okay, Ken—Kozume-san?”

Swallowing an acerbic reply, Kenma nods again sullenly. When he looks up, Oikawa has stepped closer, and there’s something unfathomable in his gaze as he regards Kenma—like they’ve met before, like they know each other down to the atom and they have fallen together bone against bone, in pieces and in wholes—

“Kenma-chan,” Oikawa says, his timid smile soft and tender. “I want to be friends. Can you try, with me, just once?”

 

 

_Try, with me, just once._

 

 

Kenma’s breath catches. The feeling in his stomach evaporates. His head swims, with light and the dusty smell of summer rain, the reflection of the moon on a tin box buried in his backyard and a man, silhouetted in silver. These moments don’t belong to _him_ , but maybe they belonged to him once. and he’s back here again, this time, _this time_ —

“No,” he breathes, and briefly registers Tooru’s face falling but then he’s stepping forward, dropping the bottles to the ground and clasping his hands behind Tooru’s neck, pushing him against the back of the gymnasium wall even as he pulls them closer together.

“No,” he repeats, and kisses Tooru. He tastes like spring and candy and cinnamon, smells like lavender, looks like _home_. Tooru gasps, surprised and giddy with obvious, heartbreaking affection as he reaches up to smooth his thumb over Kenma’s cheekbone.

“Why?” he whispers, against Kenma’s lips, but it seems like he already knows the answer.

“You’re rushing,” Kenma murmurs back. “And besides, I got sick of saying yes.”

They’ll break the cycle this time, if that’s what they’re caught in. Kenma doesn’t recall ever _remembering_ their past timelines and encounters, which must be a fortuitous sign, right? But cycle or no cycle, heartbreak or eternity, it hasn’t been so bad, has it?

“Happy early birthday,” Tooru says suddenly.

Kenma jerks back, startled. “But it’s in October—”

“I know,” Tooru laughs. “There are five months to go until we officially start dating.”

“Can’t we start now?” Kenma hums when Tooru pulls him back for another kiss, this one slower than before.

“If you’re sure you can handle me,” Tooru winks. “I know I can be larger than life, in many ways—”

“Insufferable, obnoxious, disgusting,” Kenma shuts him up with a kiss. “Let’s go back to practice. I wouldn’t offer if I didn’t think I could—” here he rolls his eyes for emphasis “—but anyway, thanks for remembering my birthday, I guess.”

Tooru grabs his hand, and locks their pinkies together as he kicks off from the wall. “Of course,” he says lightly, but the look in his eyes is far heavier. “I didn’t forget.”

Kenma smiles. “I didn’t, either.”

  


☆★☆

  


_( if you could go anywhere in the world, to any moment in time, where would you go?_

_anywhere, to any moment in time, with you. )_

**Author's Note:**

> \- i like to think that not everything is happening within the same timeline, which is why kenma meets oikawa early sometimes, and in other cases, not until their practice game (but there might still be inconsistencies, so i'm sorry ghghh)  
> \- oikawa visits 12yo kenma when he runs away while they're in college! as for kenma in that timeline...he still gets a happy ending  
> \- although oikawa doesn't call him pudding head canonically like nekoma, i bet !!! it's something he'd do  
> \- just to clear up any confusion, the story is symmetrical! they meet in the middle, in 2024  
> \- i'm also sorry for ,, gratuitous sentimentality


End file.
